The Guardian view on Europe versus Putin: a strategic journey without maps
As the latest barrage of Russian missiles rained on Kyiv on Tuesday, Finnish MPs debated new calls for a referendum on Nato membership. Along with Sweden – also militarily non-aligned – Finland is sending anti-tank missiles and other defence equipment to assist Ukraine, as it attempts to survive Russia’s brutal onslaught. The Swedes have undertaken no equivalent action since giving weapons to Finland during the Winter war with the Soviet Union in 1939. As European nations contemplate the scale of Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions, and the lengths to which he is prepared to go to fulfil them, decades-old security assumptions are being redrawn and rethought in the space of days. A strategic journey without maps is being undertaken at hairraising speed.
Nowhere are the gears being moved through faster than in Germany. At the weekend, its Social Democrat chancellor, Olaf Scholz, abandoned longstanding precepts of German foreign policy, taking Europe’s wealthiest and most powerful country on to new terrain. Faced with Mr Putin’s invasion, Mr Scholz unexpectedly rejected the postwar taboo on sending lethal weapons to conflict zones, announcing that stinger missiles and other equipment would be sent to Ukraine. In an extraordinary Sunday session of the Bundestag, he announced that a fund of €100bn (£85bn) would be immediately set up to boost the strength of Germany’s armed forces. This will be supplemented by a sustained increase in the country’s defence spending in the years to come. These measures followed last week’s decision to halt the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project – which would double the flow of Russian gas direct to Germany – and robust support for unprecedented sanctions intended to collapse the Russian economy.
For Germany, this constitutes a foreign policy pivot of huge magnitude. Shadowed by its 20th-century history, postwar Germany has adopted a low military profile and sought to promote economic interdependence as the route to geopolitical stability. Since the days of Mr Scholz’s Social Democrat predecessor, Willy Brandt, German
has mostly pursued a strategy of engagement with Moscow. But Mr Putin’s unprovoked invasion, making a mockery of diplomatic efforts by Mr Scholz and his Green foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has buried that approach for the foreseeable future. Ending German energy dependency on Russian gas, and accelerating the green transition, has become a matter of national security.
A more militarily assertive Germany, alongside France, seems likely to sit at the heart of a European security architecture which is itself undergoing transformation. On Sunday, in what was described as a “watershed moment”, the EU ignored treaty prohibitions on funding military operations. The new off-budget European Peace Facility instrument will offer €500m worth of military assistance to Ukraine, and will have a ceiling of €5bn. “Another taboo has fallen,” observed the EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, approvingly. Further EU expansion to the east, a moribund subject for years, appears to be speculatively back on the table, including Ukraine.
Mr Putin’s folly has been to generate through murderous aggression the circumstances he most feared: a Europe united in solidarity with Kyiv and joined in implacable hostility towards his rogue regime. The stakes, as a pariah Kremlin tosses threats towards Finland and Sweden over Nato, and advertises Russia’s nuclear capabilities, are frighteningly high and they are rising day by day.